Warhammer Short Story: A Predator's Silence
by Mojo1586
Summary: "Solitary contemplation offers the best opportunity for revelation." - Shade Lord Arkhas Fal. To be one of the Carcharodon Astra is to be as the Void itself, in all aspects. Silent, lethal, unyielding. A predator of the Outer Dark, never to rest, slaying until finally slain in kind. A Carcharodons Astra Short Story


_**(Disclaimer: I don't claim to own Warhammer 40k, Space Marines, or any such thing. Those strictly fall under the purview of Games Workshop and all their affiliates. This is just a passion project.)**_

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_**A/N: Warning, perspective shifts from 1st to 3rd person.**_

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**\- A Predator's Silence -**

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**"Solitary contemplation offers the best opportunity for revelation."**

_—Shade Lord Arkhas Fal, from the foundational text, Beyond the Veil of Stars, Chapter III, Verse XI_

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**-I-**

The truth of the Void, that interstellar nightfall stretched forever across the heavens of so many worlds ignorant to its callous nature, is in silence.

Unfathomable to comprehend in ever present scope, utterly lethal in its ability to steal away life in but a moment's breadth, unyielding in every aspect and lacking all forms of mercy or hesitation.

It is in such qualities that the Void Brethren of the Adeptus Astartes Chapter, known to those most ancient of data-vaults on a mere handful of worlds merely as 'Carcharodons Astra', strive to emulate in manner and deed. Both in conflict and life. with as much credence as they do that monster of Terran providence inscribed upon pauldron and banner.

A silent predator of the deeps, charting the cold blackness of the void in endless search of prey. Driven by an innate hunger that could never be satisfied despite the passage of millennia. And so they were...

Unfathomable, they dwell amidst endless uncharted expanse aboard ancient voidships of long forgotten pattern. Bearing with them armaments from a time long past and better left forgotten. Raised to strike out at those that might threaten their Master's Imperium by dint of their very existence. Be they Xenos, Traitor, Heretic.

Silent and calculating in pursuit, they striking swift and succinct with fury unmatched to rip and tear at the throats of all resistance when the time comes. Violent, brutal, leaving naught but corpses and warnings in their wake for those that might follow in step.

Such is their calling, such is their remit. A charge delivered by the word of one no longer remembered in loyal service of a Throneworld their ranks shall never lay eyes upon. The blessings of Rangu, the Void Father, Master of Mankind, to guide their steps...

To be one of the Carcharodon Astra is to be as the Void itself, in all aspects. Silent, lethal, unyielding. A predator of the Outer Dark, never to rest, slaying until finally slain in kind. Lost in a battle none but the Chapter were likely ever remember.

To be any less, to dare hesitate...

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**-II-**

...would mean death, more likely than not.

As such I do my utmost not shiver or cry out as the chill caress of the immersion pool's black waters finally reach my torso. Creeping steadily along pale sun-starved flesh like frigid tendrils stealing along my spine, knives of burning ice seeking to prickle at the back of my neck. Its touch further irritating the pale scar tissue present across my limbs and torso, remnants of exacting surgeries only recently mended weeks earlier under the Apothecarion's knives.

This mark along with a fresh pressure in my shaven skull, a sickening weight in my chest as my heartbeat is occasionally joined in discordant concert by that of another. Trembling legs, swollen already with ascendant muscular change, numbed to a point far past mere discomfort after mere minutes submersion.

But still I do not give voice to such things, for that is weakness.

Merely standing silent and naked along the smoothed stone shoals of the testing grotto as the others do in imitation of our betters. Trying to ignore the fleeting outlines along the walls of the warren, just barely visible in the harsh illumination cast by the few burning lumen globes miraculously still functional after their trek through the tunnels from the surface.

Several of the carvings revealed portraying long sinuous shapes, mimicking all too perfectly those darting white finned shapes present in the deeper depths of the shimmering pool just beneath the surface.

That alpha predator of the depths, the great carcharodon...

Not these, its smaller kin, though no less dangerous or admired. Even the wall's crude renditions displaying a reverence for the beasts that was clear to one with the eyes to look and the heart to understand. Who might it have been to first lay chisel to stone? Some long ago remnant of humanity dwelling upon this benighted world of caverns and warrens? An initiate of ages passed left to wander and contemplate?

Idle thoughts born of childish curiosity, easily discarded. Distractions to be ignored along with so much else, for that is the way of things. Who I am now...

Omeca-Seven-One-Io...this is the name gifted by the Chapter upon my induction as Initiate. A rank and title I again only just recall understanding very little of in the days before, but for what it meant. That I had been chosen, selected, whether I'd wished to or not.

Omeca-Seven-One-Io, my designation as it is known to those that I must now seek to impress with every breath. So it would be until I earned another, one more fitting to describe my purpose in the Chapter...but another name had once bore meaning long ago, I think. Certainly one had, swimming at the depths of memory hazy and ill-shaped.

A warrior's name, born of lengthy tradition in honour of a clan no longer my own, sworn to a dwelling that means nothing any longer. So much of the once indelible forgotten in mere months, but the body remembers. The light of a homeworld's binary sun on my skin, the smell of fresh air untainted by the pungent odor of passing millennia and thousands of labored sweat drenched bodies kept in close confines, a birth mother's smiling features as she moves to embrace her child at the end of his first voyage between the isles.

All of this purposely sacrificed to the teaching implements bleaching our minds clean of predisposition, leaving naught but false memories and experiences in their wake necessary to forge and instruct what we must each strive to become. It was on one such occasion after time spent with the strange learning machines of the Chapter, that I lost command of my clan's tongue. Unable to speak naught but jumbled phrases of implanted High Gothic, interspersed with lore pertaining to the methods of proper boltgun operation and maintenance spanning a half dozen varied patterns.

My birth language never did truly return, and what did merely accented phrase and loose syntax deemed succinctly meaningless. For that I fought all the harder in sorrow, killing two of my brother initiates in sparring as they tried to take me unawares. Their bodies broken under my fists, necks twisted at impossible angles, bloody chunks stringed between teeth...I received commendation, and the sorrow was forgotten.

Days passed, each spent relearning the art of speech and literacy, enduring the stinging expansion of my mind again and again.

Experiencing waking dreams of places I'd never been, knowing of cultures and age spun history with a clarity more real than the pain of injuries taken in live training. Even these then to be picked over and examined by Void Brethren of the Librarium, so similar to the winged raptora of forgotten seas picking at a drifting carcass with curved beaks and jagged teeth.

Pieces of myself lost to beings bearing the soulless black gaze of monsters and the likeness of giants, deaths all. Never to be reclaimed but in those rare nights they assail my rest in vivid patchwork...and I am the better for it.

All this I do, allow, and tolerate without thought of complaint, for that is what is expected of me. Expected of all those chosen tithed to the Nomad Predation Fleet...tithed to the Chapter...tithed to a life and death in the Outer Dark in Rangu's name.

The few found worthy of ascension, attempting to become monsters themselves...

Back unbowed and unabashed, I manage to remain unflinching as a pair of lesser slave serfs move about in expected silence. Going about the mundane duty of draping thick leather harnesses across thin shoulders with unspoken efficiency if lacking gentle touch. Such was not their purpose, and would no doubt have proven wasted effort.

With deft fingers born of long years delicate labor they tightened leather bands to the extent of drawing pained gasps, moving to fit the straps of a bulky re-breather mask to sallow cheeks. Paled by want of a sun, schooled into a passive grimace I yet vaguely recall, not seen in anything more than scant reflections glimpsed in scored hull plating or across the edge of a whetted blade for many months.

Many others of my shiver prove not so composed. The newest and youngest of those tithed huddling together for what warmth could still be had, as I once had months before though never so...pitifully. Squalling in pain at the rough treatment applied by their own handlers, or otherwise whimpering at the obvious meaning behind our preparations.

Though in uncharacteristic fashion, the display of weakness goes unremarked upon by our silent masters who hold vigil from the shores.

A pair of them stand unmoving, rendered statues in the harsh lighting but for the insistent active thrum of thrice blessed wargear. The subtle tension of flexing fibre bundles and blessed motive cabling carried gently across the smooth grey stone, enough to set my teeth on edge behind the rubberized seals of the mask.

One hunched in the ashen grey plate of our Master of trial, swirling white exile marks painting his vambraces and the brows of a beaked helm honouring the Chapter's genetic lineage. The other armoured in the cerulean blue heraldry of the Librarius though similarly adorned in flowing designs, a staff of roughly shaped metal and jingling yellowed fangs plucked from the maws of xenos champions clutched loose in a mailed fist. Unhelmed, his visage bared to all reveals a gaunt creature of pallid flesh spotted with grey denticle scabbing, grimacing to expose rows of pointed teeth.

Under normal circumstance such lapses in their charges would be curtailed swiftly by such Void Brethren as matter of course. Harsh and often fatal punishment meted out as firm signal to others that might seek to emulate such behaviors.

But not this day, it seemed.

Today penance would be carried out by far less merciful proctors. This obvious to those of us who had withstood similar trials before.

Each awaiting their cue to advance deeper into the pool, sinking into the chilling embrace of those unseen predators that dwelt within. Any moment now, the waiting drawn out purposefully to afflict trepidation. A common ploy of the Void Brethren, one that I have learned in recent months to resist.

Many are not so fortunate...

**_+("...Step forward, Aspirant...")+_**

The sending comes with the cruel knifing ache of a needle piercing my temple, words without voice and painted by crude contempt, eliciting a gasping intake of breath. Such suddenness reflexively kicking the secondary organ in my chest to life, beating steadily in erratic disharmony with its larger twin. An unfamiliar sensation to be sure, another adjustment that needs be forced.

Many of those youngest to either side crying out in fearful alarm, their sickening fear echoing throughout the warrens. Bodies thrashing about in the water like fish caught on a line...that memory playing host for the merest of moments. Warmth of rose-hued sands underfoot, boisterous laughter unmistakably male, a hand ruffling dark braids I no longer possess with the pride in one's progeny...and then it is gone.

Departing just as quickly with the first huffing intake of recycled air from the re-breather, stale and sour.

I do not act as those others do in their mindless terrors, requiring serfs to manhandle them deeper into the pool. Instead striding forward with a confidence born of resignation, alongside others of similar mind with special care not to disturb the waters overmuch with our passing.

Respecting silently what drifted beneath in shadowed depths.

Further and further I walked, heedless of the glows being smothered, of the carvings and their eerie significance vanishing as if the void itself had swallowed them whole. Leaving not but the gentle sloshing of tides, the wheezing intake of recycled breaths, and the weeping of terrified youths that soon enough too fell silent.

Only the cold remained constant throughout as the pool seeks eagerly to claim me. Creeping upwards to swallow my midriff and the pulsing meat within, leeching along my spine to gnaw my bones, tangling about my throat, whispering softly in my ears...

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**-III-**

...and only a meager handful of minutes yet before the first of our shiver succumbs. Claimed by the brutal nature of the trial.

Doing so, ironically enough for what such things are worth to what remains of his meager life, in the honoured silence of the Chapter's teachings. Though still, it is hardly a gentle or clean end...

Lacking the Eye of Vengeance that would one day illuminate all things before our sight, most of us drift blindly in the dark. Isolated, we do not see our younger brother's flailing, born of hypothermia and what might well be a malfunctioning air scrubber. Either way, it seeds fear into the waters, this we feel intently.

Paired hearts racing to funnel warm life blood to tingling extremities numbed, pumping in hopes that they might provide escape and safety as foolish as such a notion is. Kicking and grasping movements abound in naivety, exciting the currents around him in expanding ripples I feel, meaning he is close. Evidence of an existence I just barely perceive across paled flesh flooded with the beginnings of genetic divinity.

An existence felt keenly by the true inhabitants of the pool, warmth and movement drawing their attentions. The first and boldest of the monsters probes ahead of its fellows, a languid presence treading towards this fresh disturbance in their midst. An exploratory scrape of grating skin on skin to perceive the warm sustenance flowing within. The contact brief, feather light in wonder, yet even so propels the prey towards only greater heights of frantic struggling as the mind perceives and instinct takes hold, lashing out in an environment ill suited.

One of the younger Initiates, indoctrination not yet having taken hold to deride such reckless haste. He acts the human, and dies as one.

Fleeting traces of iron warmth colors the surrounding currents now, the beast having drawn first blood and found the meat to its preference. This only spurs the others, the scent of vitae driving the whole of the herd to frenzy. Shadows falling upon the youth in a thrashing flurry of flashing teeth, savaged viscera, and arterial matter. Darting shapes traversing the depths in numbers that evoke the carvings in the cavern above once more. Monsters in the dark, drifting with the taste of life in their maws...

A display which in turn only drives others to similar fates, their fear both physical and emotional painting a beacon in the black as bright as a newborn star I might taste as they do were only I to remove the mask. But I do not.

Such foolish temptation resisted, for in time I would be capable of such things as naturally as the pulse of beating hearts. The contraction of mortal lungs unchanged yet unfit for the task of survival.

But in time...in _this _time, I would observe. Learn...

How many perish in this time's silence? A handful? Moreso? This I cannot say with certainty. To my knowledge, I could have been the only one left in the pool who as yet still drew breath. Lingering amidst the aftermath of slaughter in water thick with the blood of others less worthy.

And if such were truly so, would it even matter? I still lived, thus I still continue. Such was the nature of the trial, such was what was expected by our Masters. Expected of Omeca-Seven-One-Io...expected of me.

Those who would call themselves my Brothers yet failed in this, simply more distractions. Unnecessary, purposeless in this serene microcosm of nature's cruelty. Much like...

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**-IV-**

...the visions swimming languidly at the furthest edges of sense and awareness, unreal, yet overwhelmingly present in the moment.

Immutable, I sense this fact without the useless impulses urging me to open my eyes. To fruitlessly peer into darkness beyond for ghosts looming in the night...

So sedate at times in their disruption it is difficult to fathom the difference between the real dangers of predatory beasts and the creeping paranoia born of false perceptions. One moves in truth, stirring frigid waters about my hunched form in rippling caresses of sensation. The other nonexistent but for the presence my traitorous mind provides. Its efforts seeking to undermine, to irritate and deceive.

Within the shadowed depths of blind silence both are threats, each easily proving lethal as the other. Each made worse by the cold...the constant familiar bone numbing cold, barely kept at bay by the heat of a body swept up in the wake of ascendant change...

How long have I been submerged in this void this time, absent all but for those basest senses of touch? Hours certainly...

All but the eldest of initiates, they whose bodies had long since reached a cusp of induction where such concerns as temperature, terror, even breathing fell far beyond them, would have already been pulled from immersion by order of the Void Brethren long ago. Those who still survived in the face of exposure and predatory hunger at any rate, dragged by the lines secured to their equipment back slowly into the lightless warrens of the cavern above. Forced to kneel on jagged shores among their surviving kin before their armoured Masters, charged to meditate and reflect on the nature of their experience.

On the truth of such mighty predators, reflections of whom they must all strive to become. All in service of the Nomad Predation Fleet, of the Void Father and his vast Imperium we will never be apart of.

Yet, never had I been left astray for so long, never. Had I been forgotten? Punished for some transgression or failing unknown? How long would the oxygen flowing through my mask continue to flow if they had? Could it cease at any moment, leaving me to suffocate in the black?

An emotion not quite fear but well beyond simple trepidation rippled through a frame rendered rangy beyond its years by genetic conditioning,

As if in response to the notion, or perhaps drawn because of it, I feel a moment's contact with coarse placoid hide. One of them, a youth the length of my arm, brushes against my skin. Drawn, if only in its gorged torpor from kills already consumed, by crude emotion having taken hold in inattention,

And for a moment I am all too mortal once again. Every notion in my mind screaming to act, training forgotten. The urge to fight, to flee and see skin torn and blood shed in the offing...mortal impulses to which I almost succumb.

Instead I breath slow and deep in the manner taught by the teaching machines, one of meditation and pre-combat calm. Slowing the arrhythmic tempo playing itself ragged in my own chest, allowing myself to drift languidly in the surf along with the curious monster. Swimming with it in languid strokes that do not quite match its lithe grace.

How must I appear? As merely another obstacle in its eyes, or perhaps simply another breed of monster all together? Kin to itself in purpose, if not wholly of kind, certainly far from equal in this environs...for now. Given time, perhaps I would grow as this beast would? Body changing to fulfill the purpose blessed Rangu had in store. One day I might even return, bearing a new name and perhaps even new thoughts to compliment a greater nature?

I cannot know such things, knowledge of the ever shifting patterns of the future far beyond the mundane gaze of one such as I.

Nothing is certain but for one thing...I've not been forgotten, far from it.

This I tell myself fervently, muscled arms writ heavy with scars old and new carrying me forward through the cold dark. Veins chilled to bone, joints aching with every motion, but still alive even as others of the frenzy join me and the youngling in our swim. Forever moving forward, searching for the next prey...

No, I've not been forgotten. Merely tested further, as is the way of the Void Brethren of the Nomad Predation Fleet. An isolation born of abject necessity to ensure only those most worthy of precious resource and time would proceed, stage by painful degrading stage, to further trials beyond.

I could certainly hate them for it, such beings cared little for the concerns of one such as I, only in what I could off them in the future by my success or failure.

What small part of me, that which is still wholly human, presses to do just that even as it is picked apart and discarded by greater purpose and drive, but the truth that is now me endures all the same. Regardless of discomfort and torment, blissful in this existence, in _this _moment as individuality is discarded at least for a time.

Omeca-Seven-One-Io endures, for that is what is expected of him as one of the Shiver, one of this ever drifting Frenzy. Grinning pointed teeth beneath the rubberized seals of his rebreather, all the while drifting in the void with a predator's hungering silence.

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**Rebel Industrial World - Endymion Prime**

**Endymion System, Segmentum Ultima**

**+Hive Alpha, Planetary Capitol+**

**(Imperial Date - 910.M41, approx.)**

**-V-**

Over the winding course of the Badab Rebellion, an internecine conflict born of greed and misplaced honour all but guaranteed to stand as one of the most infamous follies in the Imperium of Man's recent history, many legends both courageous and infamous had come to light.

Perhaps something to have been expected of a war waged in the name of a mad Tyrant, fought by the combined forces of several thousand transhuman warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, and earmarked by the highest of authorities amongst the God-Emperor's own Holy Inquisition.

Names of heroes and traitors alike spread wide on astropathic whispers into the furthest banks of deep Void, carrying with them missives for aid and taunting recrimination both in equal measure. Imperial Commanders, supposed men and women of fine quality and martial bearing, reduced to shameful begging and pitiable bequests in the face of four storied Space Marine Chapters and the legions of mortal followers flitting about like ripper fish with a fresh blood scent.

Whole swathes of territory risen up in fitful rebellion, shaped into nigh impenetrable bulwarks by the hand of the Tyrant of Badab and those deluded renegades gathering in his shadow.

The Endymion Cluster had marked itself out as such a thorn in the sides of the Loyalist cause, and done so proudly at that. What having once merely been a relatively backwater collection of obscure if loyal Imperial Worlds, notable only for the nominal tithes of both materiel wealth expected to support the ever constant needs of Holy Terra, had become a seething hotbed of sedition and resistance rivaling that of Badab itself if born from pride rather than simple avarice.

The reason stemming from the aegis of their once noble defenders, the so-named 'Mantis Warriors'. Rare sons of sons descended from the Warhawk of Chogoris skilled in their forebears guerilla tactics, the Chapter had by all accounts served with honour in its relatively short history. Well regarded in the annals of Imperial record with centuries of esteem, progress, and honour in Terra's service to mark their place.

All of it thrown aside for the prideful ambitions of one man and a debt of honour poorly chosen. Those they were charged to protect descending alongside their nigh mythic guardians straight into the arms of sedition.

It was for this among other lesser crimes that they were condemned to die, and die brutally at that. Their campaign of resistance yet unable to withstand sheer predatory might of the Carcharodon's relentless onslaught throughout, butchered wholesale alongside those they'd fought so long and suffered so much to protect.

Souls as those existing within the winding Industrialscapes of Endymion Prime, chief center of production and artifice within the cluster deserving of its name for its middling importance to various war fronts in half a dozen other embattled regions. Once, before the conflict, an ugly abused world of vast manufactoria and materiel refineries stretching for miles, bustling work districts and guild offices to house and manage the raw humanity needed to crew them, and endless quotas for an ever-hungering Imperium starved by war.

Now it was simply ugly, caught up in storms of thick sludge masquerading as rainfall, seething with rebellion and false ideals...

_**"...Bloody the waters..."**_

Such was to be the fate of rebels and dissidents. So had the Red Wake decreed simply to his followers in that final briefing aboard the _Nicor_ before commencement of teleport translation into the contested Hive proper.

_**"...Show them naught but totality. Let Heresy not go unrewarded..."**_

Such were the words of Tyberos, of his Shade Lord, and so it was that Kōmeke slew and butchered with contemptuous impunity alongside others of the '_Red Brethren'. _The entirety of the Chapter's elite First Company having lain stolid claim to the reaping of first blood, as was their right devoid of challenge from other lesser companies. The rest of those Imperial Forces present still in orbit, including their simmering and battered cousins of the Fire Hawks Chapter, left to partake of the planetary assault from a distance.

Left to watch true void Predators gorge themselves in gore-soaked waters...

Not that there could be any great deal of resistance on the part of the enemy to enjoy given the circumstances. Taken off guard as much as the embattled Loyalist's allies still remaining by the unexpected mass teleportation loci of nigh a hundred armed and armoured Astartes directly into their midst. Whole squads situated at predetermined junction points personally selected by the Red Wake. Each designated as critical to the Hive City's defenses, and so each would be taken or destroyed by the _Brethren's_ closing jaws.

Such was expected of them...expected of Kōmeke, Strike Leader of a squad of the Red Wake's own kindred.

Those unfortunate souls present not immediately brought to their knees, cast down in delirium and vomiting by the sudden discharges of breaking air pressure and sound heralding their arrival, stood with as much courage as could be expected of mortals defending their homes. Subsequently to be ripped asunder on lightning sheathed talons, the astartes beginning their bloody work at close quarters as preferred, rendering abattoirs of bunkers and the Hive's winding side avenues.

Lasguns and what raw ordinance such soldiery could carry proven immediately and painfully ineffective in the face of the Carcharodon's Terminators.

Bedecked as they were in hulking suits of Tactical Dreadnought Armour, chipped and dented shells of ash grey Ceramite-plasteel composite daubed with crimson markings and hung heavy with scrimshawed tokens mounted upon brutish exo-skeletal structures of thrice-blessed adamantium, the _Brethren of Tyberos_ advanced step by booming step through the murky caustic storm staining their decorated plate tar black. Moving nigh unimpeded through the streets of the Hive in closing ranks. Shrugging off retaliation that would have seen standard marks of space marine pattern power armour long since reduced to slivered splinters.

Striding silent and resolute, where as their already formidable counterparts fell woefully short, such was their purpose...

Responding to a brief threat rune shimmering across his helm's display, Kōmeke shifted his upper torso even as he killed the soldier's fellows, angling a broadly curved shoulder pauldron spattered liberally in viscera towards the path of an oncoming krak missile. One fired from the upper stories of a squat derelict habitation block by a specialist of the enemies guerrilla detachments most likely, the Mantis Warriors favoring such tactics.

Regardless the deadly projectile, a tool built and blessed to slay the likes of tanks, found itself casually turned aside by void hardened plasteel with nary a few sparks cast to mark its passing. Shrieking away to detonate semi-harmlessly a few metres distant in a gout of roiling flame and masonry that set a derelict groundcar flipping end over end through the facing of an abandoned guildhall. The resultant secondary heat bursts spreading throughout the interior to blaze greedily with an abundance of fuel

It's flight path having already been calculated and tracked by the cogitation engines embedded within his helm's tactical suite. Point of origin singled out to Void Brother Mikaere, the bearer of his Squad's heavy weapon. A war-scarred assault cannon heavy with the weight of centuries, kill-markings, and the potency of well-worn function given form and purpose.

True to its task, t'was only a matter of heartbeats before the window the hapless operative had utilized, along with much of the room beyond, was carved free in a six second burst from the whirring rotary armament. The unfortunate occupant and any who might've stood beside him reduced to a moment's heat shimmer of crimson blood mist, shattered permacrete, and fragmented bone. Subsequently lost on rain swept amidst the dampened dust and smoke of a city center besieged.

Only a few miles distant from their position, tactical squads alongside jump packed equipped Devourers would be spilling from scalding drop pods in assigned execution details. Maneuvering through the city's manufacturing and habitation sectors at the rear, acting as the wave gathers and ebbs in the wake of the ripping tide. Intent on drawing out and punishing what few traitors the Terminators had deigned to leave cowering in darkened byways, be they armed or not. Chainaxe and bolt pistol expressing the savagery their wielders sacrificed to silence.

This city and its peoples had rebelled, displaying a defiance written in their inability to submit simply to the will of Rangu and distant Terra as all humankind must. Fleeing civilians driven to mindless terror, deluded soldiery fighting their terror along with the inevitable, renegade Space Marines in dereliction of their most sacred oaths...all must be brought to account for such inaction in smoke and blood.

From inaction are the seeds of sedition allowed to cultivate. For the crime of allowing matters to progress to such a state, they had surrendered any right to mercy or consideration. Simply chaff, simply prey...

Eddies of resistance that might once have stood defiant against all odds broke under the might and sheer onrushing momentum of his Terminators.

Even those rare Mantis Warriors standing in feverish support of their mortal auxilia, stolidly resigned in their resistance, fared little better than the human chattel that died in droves at their heels. The Brethren's bloody frenzy having already carved a wriggling path freshly laden with transhuman dead behind them, the clear majority of it moldering in green painted ceramite.

More added to the tally with each passing minute with each slice of crackling talon and every sweep of Mikaere's roaring cannon.

Eyes of the Void Father did they fight and bleed harshly for every metre of ground lost to them, standing resolute with thundering boltgun and screaming chainsword in hand until both chamber clicked empty and tooth tore free from track, unwilling to retreat even in the face of overwhelming odds. Actions that those of more boisterous Astartes Chapters might even have considered glorious and honorable, seditious traitors or no.

_-"Perhaps the Traitors understand their folly."- _Mikaere breaks his sacred silence over the squad level vox channel if not openly, snarling thickly with the effort of driving his heavy boot into the skull of a fallen warrior seeking to grapple at his legs. His own separated at the knees. _-"Seeking to die with dignity as their creed demands. Fearing the Void Father's wrath."-_

"No. Such sacrifice is not their way. Nor is fear." His Strike Leader responds with signal to the rest of the squad to advance in the younger Brother's wake, voice a whispering rasp of a blade drawn across a whetstone. Soured by lack of use. "Observe, and kill as the Red Wake desires. Such is demanded."

_-"Such is expected, Strike Leader."-_ Mikaere replies in ritual contrition, his even temperament however subsumed with another growl to join that of his armour as it turns to guide his scything salvo across crenelated rooftops. The waste of ammunition excessive but still just within acceptable deployment parameters. If only just.

Green-clad shapes dart about in the rising dust, moving in imitation of the insects upon their pauldrons from perch to perch. Visible and crimson hued swatches across the squad's helm optics, further outlined by measured single shots of stalker pattern bolters stinging down from above like hail across the Carcharodon's blessed warplate. Perhaps seeking to harry their movements further into the city, delay the inevitable, though only earning the younger Brethren's pursuit for their trouble.

Evidently he views such things as honoured sport. Blind in the thrill of the slaughter and allowing audible growls to spill from his vox-emitter. Blind as he is drawn out of position in his eagerness, separated from the shiver...simply Blind.

Kōmeke saw differently with a Predator's gaze tempered by years within the deep void, parrying the humming edge of a curved powersword along the flat of his talons in a storm of clashing disruptive energies. The weapon wielded by a Mantis bearing the trappings of an Sergeant, and in him the Strike Leader observed not the defiant last stand of Warriors choosing where they would die, but the final desperations of men vying for the attentions of their killers.

Such was not a thing desired by any means, but actions forced by what they viewed as necessity. A crippling weakness of martial character derived from foolish compassion, sentiment, and devotion.

The Mantis Warriors were not committing themselves so openly after years of committed subtly warfare across the sector, killing and being killed in turn, for the sake of final glory or bitter spite. Instead, the sons of Marauders sought to protect and safeguard the lives of their people with their own. Bleeding transhuman vitae upon the ash darkened streets to spare civilians from harm.

Foolishly naive, the Red Wake having foreseen as such and seeking to exploit such weakness with the infliction of wholesale slaughter upon this Hive's populace and those of other cities under the guns of other Companies. The _Nicor _only one of several Chapter vessels if clearly superior as alpha, the bulk of the Nomad Predation fleet poised to stain this world red so as to draw the hapless enemy into the fray.

And so they killed, despite the mewling protests of those loyalist forces lingering in orbit. Some shamefully daring to call themselves Astartes even as they decried the tactics that would win them this war.

Kōmeke nearly allowing a disgusted grimace to manifest beneath the bestial snout of his helm, the Mantis with which he dueled cursing him vehemently with every breath. A sweeping riposte that carved a thin line across the Strike Leader's gorget, the Space Marine's furious taunts decrying this wholesale slaughter the act of heartless beasts lacking honour, monstrous...

Perhaps in the eyes of some this might be so, though it was still his opponent who fell to the ground after approximately fifteen frantic seconds more with dominant hand, much of his helm, face, and portions of the skull beneath sheared free in a moment's distraction. A ragged girl child coated thick in gore wandering the corpse riddled streets, shrilly wailing plaintively for her matriarch of all things. Her cries having drawn his attention for but a fraction of a heartbeat, slaying his concentration.

That such a thing would see a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes and host of likely decades combat experience laid low...

"Pitiful." Kōmeke breathes simply in the hollow depths of his helm, sparing the fallen officer no more mind. His life merely another marking alongside so many others as his squad see to the remainder...

Yet not quite all were so helpless, a fact he realizes and Mikaere learns all too suddenly as the air suddenly comes alight with lethal brilliance that even the protection offered by Terminator armour couldn't quell. The younger Void Brother's upper body seeming simply to dissolve in a haze acrid super-heated malaise cast forth by a weapon that put even his venerable, and now lost, Assault cannon to shame. What remained standing a few heartbeats more before toppling forward heavily to the permacrete beneath in a heap.

Regrettable, though his demise serves purpose in marking out the enemy ambush, and in revealing the far greater threat barring their path.

One heralded by the ponderous tread of a marching dreadnought in the colours of the prey rounding the intersect between mauled avenues. Its profile having been masked from earlier surveyor returns by background scatter of radiation cast from the surrounding structures. Castraferrum Pattern Mark V, armed with the still steaming weight of a dual barreled multi-melta mounted upon a battle-scored chassis that now swiveled on its axis towards the Terminators butchering its allies.

**_/- Hostile Engine Engaged...Support requested..._**

Kōmeke's signaled warning rings with the chiming cry of flickering runes indicating target lock, all blink-clicked aside in the rush to scatter before the alpha level threat. Such notice coming too late for Te Hare, the Void Brother vanishing in the same manner as Mikaere if more completely before he could take a step, naught left but an ashen outline seared across blackened mortar.

Ihaka dies moments afterward, the Terminator unable to evade the grasping adamantium claw that formed the combat walker's offhand in time. Brutish bulk meant to weather any storm snatched up to dangle helpless in the air despite his struggling, dashing lightning sheathed talons against unyielding inevitability. Hydraulic force compressing to full impetus with a steady screech of servos, armour seals that could withstand the void buckling and then finally popping beneath the intense pressure.

Ihaka makes much the same noise as his internal structure is ground to paste within his own protective carapace, only wetter. More drawn out...

_**/- Request for support is acknowledged...Blood is awash in the tides, Honoured Tetahi seeks...**_

Before reply can be sent Rawiri is lost. Slain not at the dreadnought's hands but those of its allies.

Contrails split rain accompanied by subsonic cracks barely audible to the Strike Leader's autosensory suite, but the result is clear enough as his squadmate's movements seem to judder abruptly before slackening in mid motion as his armour remains upright in the middle of the avenue. Stabilization aids within the frame supporting not but dead lifeless flesh within, leaking bright crimson from a handful of breaches across limb and neck seals.

Killed by concentrated high caliber sniper fire attacking the hind joints, sites where even the aegis of Tactical Dreadnought Armour must be made weaker by the necessities of movement. Executed by concealed warriors Mikaere had clearly missed in his blind slaughter in an exceptional display of marksmanship and initiative that the Strike Leader would have viewed with high praise in any other circumstance, were the situation any different.

An ambush, sacrificing some in order to bait the line. He imagines he can hear the fallen officer laughing from where he lay beneath and behind, choking mirth through a face ravaged. And worse, he is right to do so.

A force of ten Astartes reduced to six in naught but moments, this indignity finally frees his wrath into the open at the same moment a shot cast from one of the hidden Mantis warriors glances across his thigh plate, piercing protective layer and flesh beneath. Fine attempt made to cripple tendon and muscle beneath, and slay his movement for others to finish him.

Too shallow by far, he continues to sprint at the awkward lumbering pace afforded by his armour, movement his ally. What pain existed with the wound was lost to the rush of chemical stimulants flooding his veins in through intravenous ports. The combat drugs sharpening his prodigious focus, exciting the killing urge to turgid wakefulness as wet warmth coats his outward plating to join that of previous foes.

Sound vocalized in wordless snarl made monstrously inhuman through vox corruption and seething anger spilled from bloodied lips, condemning the prey that thought themselves the predator. His squad engaging as well, storm bolters driving the snipers from their perches, claws raised in defense...

Such resistance was expected too as well, the Red Wake accounting for all things in their deployment.

A pulsing signal ticking across his eye lenses in reply to his earlier summons, approaching at speed even as another of the Brethren dies. His body scattered by actinic fusion that casts a blanket of superheated water vapor across the contested block to fog fitfully against helm lenses. The steaming barrels of the melta weapon rounding to face him, blurring at the ferocious heat blossoming within.

Within seconds he would be as Mikaere and Te Hare, another shadow burned upon stone, however...

Silent as the void, Kōmeke raises twin lightning claws that fizzle and crack as the mist excites conflicting power fields, head bowed, though not in surrender or challenge. The former is anathema, a concept foreign in the mind of a Chapter existing only to hunt until slain. The latter proves unnecessary, his life only the distraction needed to force the commitment of this precious resource in the rebel's arsenal.

A trap for those that thought themselves the hunter, the predator... an enemy's tactic turned against them in kind. The collapsing manufactoria betraying those that sought its defence, turned to the will of Tyberos and the Void Father's vengeance with a booming roar of shattering infrastructure and hateful frenzy long denied.

A sonorous roar swimming with corrupted Vox-distortion yet unmistakable in the might of its conviction, tolling like a mighty bell through the audible range, reverberating through the rain swept night. Kōmeke's ears popping painfully, body swaying under an unfamiliar wave of disorientation before his enhanced physiology compensated appropriately. Though even so, were he not encased in such armament he might well have gone to one knee in reverence.

Another giant thundered from the wall of steaming fog and smoldering ashes, smashing a path through permacrete front facing of a guild storage facility in frenzied attempt to reach its squat counterpart.

This hulking behemoth of grey and crimson streaked adamantium and ceramite armor plating lined with sinuous traceries of exile marks earned across centuries of service to the Void Father and the 1st Company. Born aloft on 'muscles' of electro-fibre and ancient magna-coils thrumming with the blessed sunburst power of its reactor heart, in turn fueling the twin talons sibling to those the Strike Leader and other Brethren wield.

This thing guided not by some feral instinct, but the will of a force of will both Ancient and Unrelenting even in death. A creation hailing from a time of progress and glory well beyond present days of darkness and uncertainty.

Kōmeke doesn't offer challenge, merely displaying respect as do those others of the squad still drawing breath. Paying homage to the Wandering Ancestor who walks beside them now, cast in the image of a mighty Contemptor Pattern Dreadnought.

Wandering Ancestor Tetahi had been awoken in conflict, and by his presence the enemies of the Chapter would know truest slaughter along the talons of...

* * *

**-VI-**

...He who was the '_White Maw'_, drifting through the void until called to strike at the behest of his Kindred...and he had been called...called to war from the turgid depths of the Outer Darkness. And I was he, he who wakes from the dark of dreamless slumber to slaughter the foes of the Chapter, my Chapter...I am Carcharodon Astra...I am the Predator who smiles in frozen embrace.

This...The cold is constant, the voidborn chill of the Outer Dark, the cold that has lingered since that most precious of trials so long ago. A ruined carcass of atrophied muscle and denticle scabbing wracked by its touch, shuddering, adrift in the amniotic womb that has housed and sheltered it for generations since the moment it had collapsed for the last time on a world none would remember to an enemy slaughtered wholesale.

Never to threaten an Imperium that would never know the sacrifices of those that had ensured its safety.

Such foolish distractions...I am this body, this shriveled thing with so little flesh remaining, though also I walk again with the limbs gifted me by those that entombed me within. It is a conundrum, a disparity in an existence that requires none...so it is forgotten as distraction with the waking.

More importantly, I kill and make war again as I once did, as is my purpose warmed by rage and chemical alchemy that never quite banishes the cold...

_'...For Rangu, for the Void Father...'_

Pistons pulse against the pull of gravity and fibre-bundles flex in place of muscle and bone as I am propelled forth at full run. Both bodies juddering with the motion, unceasing and unstoppable...yet unreal, separate and drifting. No...I must focus! I am eager to bleed the foe as always, for it has been too long since the last. How long has it been?

This I do not know for I have no need to. Decades? Centuries? It matters little, for in the present moment there is only the hunt, only the enemy...

_'...For the Forgotten One, kill...kill...**KILL**...**MEET THE PREY**...**I KILL**...!'_

Flickering target reticules marking acquisitions calculated by ancient feral logic engines fill my sensorium in scrolling scatter too swift for any but a mind trained and honed by disciplines genetic and psychological to bear, let alone process. Power levels, chassis shell integrity, internal temperature levels, external temperature levels, lubrication measures, local elevation and air pressure, nutrient and biological status of the husk that was once me, is me...all of it ignored for what is important, the moment.

Projected firing arcs and energy signature inherent of the highlighted Maxima Pattern Multi-Melta dance across blind eyes even as my sarcophagus's talons..._my_ talons...rend the mighty mounted armament from housing in an explosive pall of sparks and sickly coolant fluids.

_'...I want to feel it, the blood on my skin, the taste...'_

This is impossible, and has been for so very long. The neuro-synaptic link allowing for a shadow of sensation, a dream of what I desire, though it is hardly the same. Detached, ignorant of the joys of truest feeling.

So instead I content myself in the grinding of adamantium across chassis, jostling what remains of my flesh in phantom sensations while ears that no longer hear enjoy the blurted screams of my counterpart. Vox-garbled frustrations coloured by traces of the agony inflicted by sympathetic union with his own prison of iron. Howls that continue on until he is slain, his shell opened by lightning wreathed talons, dragged apart to expose the fleshy wasting flesh wriggling weakly within to the caustic rainfall without.

Left like this, the Space Marine hero would doubtless succumb in a matter of minutes. Even his ascendant transhuman flesh failing, unsupported by the life giving technologies that had sustained what facsimile of life still desperately clung to with such vehemence. What little remains of a face staring up at me with a milky eye weeping at the light of a world once more, runic signifiers birthing attempted expressions across the sensorium.

Perhaps the final gasping words of a legend among the Mantis Warriors, defiant until the end?

Irrelevant, lost as his remains are torn free from its nest of shorn cabling and spitting nutrient feeds in the grasp of my claw, thoughtlessly dashed across the side of the very edifice that had once housed him in a smear of sloughing organic matter.

It is at this junction I become cognizant that I am screaming as well just as he was, a wordless primal howl of most potent hunger. That sacred silence of the Chapter, once held so precious, now lost in the blind desire to rip and tear with blood-maddened frenzy...

_'...When had that come to pass?...'_

This too, I do not know, for I am not expected too. My thoughts, and by extension the target matrices of my coffin, merely highlight the lesser targets that seek to do harm to those Void Brethren present.

_'...So small...'_

Such a notion brings with it dim amusement, opinions and emotion dulled in the face of need. The need to destroy the foe, to savage the prey, overwhelming...and so he does so, for that is what is expected of him, of me...

Tetahi Mā, once named Omeca-Seven-One-Io, who in turn was once a boy long lost to the passing centuries when the monsters had come to rose colored beaches searching for the tithe they were owed.

He who is also me, and what little flesh remaining to him, smiles the grin for which he had once been so widely known across the breadth of the Nomad Predation Fleet as he floats in his amniotic tank solitary and alone.

The same smile worn as he had fought, killed, and then subsequently died so that he might one day kill again...For the Forgotten One...For the Imperium...For _Rangu,_ Void Father of all humankind.

Let the Carcharodons Astra drag his pitiful foes into the emptiness of the Outer Dark, seeking endlessly with a predator's silence...

* * *

_**\- Log Terminated -**_

* * *

_**A/N: Thank you much for reading! Always been a fan of the Space Sharks, especially with what Black Library's Robbie McNiven has been doing with them so far. Red Tithe, Outer Dark, A Reaping Time...so many good works, highly recommended.**_

_**Actually started writing this back during Shark Week, shows how long I've been sitting on it. - Mojo **_


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